Drawing on the Francoist use of literature as a means of social control and edification, this book examines post-war romance fictions by Spanish women novelists as narratives of female exemplarity. Under the label of exemplarity—which here denotes both a narrative modality and an interpretative strategy—are examined models of conduct that receive positive or negative sanction within the chosen texts. I contend that the practice of conferring meaning and value to given female representations is conditioned by prescribed gender and cultural norms found in a vast body of prescriptive texts (conduct manuals, treatises, and sermons) intended for the female audience of the time.

Because censorship controls not only the production but also the reception of literary works, any reading of the selected texts must take into account the constraints that regulate their meaning and interpretation. Among these constraints are the normative and normalizing tenets of womanhood, which constitute a shared body of knowledge between the novelists and their readers. Hence, the first part of this study examines the dominant, national-Catholic system of values pertaining to the conventions of representing women, while Part II demonstrates its relevance to women's literary production of the time through the analysis of selected novels. Its aim is ultimately to explore the relationship between dominant gender representations and their conditions of emergence, between authorized forms of female socialization and modes of expression, between national prerogatives and cultural expectations, between lived experiences and literary constructs.

By and large, both the novels and the authors studied here form a blind spot of literary scholarship. This neglect is sustained on one or both of two grounds: first, the alleged lack of literary merit of the selected corpus; and second, its ideological affiliation with Franco's authoritarian regime. The exceptions are made up of those authors and texts that lend themselves to counter-hegemonic readings, combining the resistance to imposed cultural and gender norms with the type of writing privileged by literary institutions. In view of the existing valorizations, the present study assumes the task of expanding the active corpus of women's writing to texts that defy the operative conventions of interpretation. With few exceptions, the choice of women-authored texts for scholarly investigation has helped to naturalize a correspondence between cultural marginality and liberal ideologies, gender and politics, women's writing and the literature of resistance and/or exile.